In Morocco eBook

In any case, however, it is not in Morocco that the
clue to Moroccan art is to be sought; though interesting
hints and mysterious reminiscences will doubtless
be found in such places as Tinmel, in the gorges of
the Atlas, where a ruined mosque of the earliest Almohad
period has been photographed by M. Doutte, and in
the curious Algerian towns of Sedrata and the Kalaa
of the Beni Hammads. Both of these latter towns
were rich and prosperous communities in the tenth
century and both were destroyed in the eleventh, so
that they survive as mediaeval Pompeiis of a quite
exceptional interest, since their architecture appears
to have been almost unaffected by classic or Byzantine
influences.

Traces of a very old indigenous art are found in the
designs on the modern white and black Berber pottery,
but this work, specimens of which are to be seen in
the Oriental Department of the Louvre, seems to go
back, by way of Central America, Greece (sixth century
B.C.) and Susa (twelfth century B.C.), to the far-off
period before the streams of human invention had divided,
and when the same loops and ripples and spirals formed
on the flowing surface of every current.

It is a disputed question whether Spanish influence
was foremost in developing the peculiarly Moroccan
art of the earliest Moslem period, or whether European
influences came by way of Syria and Palestine, and
afterward met and were crossed with those of Moorish
Spain. Probably both things happened, since the
Almoravids were in Spain; and no doubt the currents
met and mingled. At any rate, Byzantine, Greece,
and the Palestine and Syria of the Crusaders, contributed
as much as Rome and Greece to the formation of that
peculiar Moslem art which, all the way from India
to the Pillars of Hercules, built itself, with minor
variations, out of the same elements.

Arab conquerors always destroy as much as they can
of the work of their predecessors, and nothing remains,
as far as is known, of Almoravid architecture in Morocco.
But the great Almohad Sultans covered Spain and Northwest
Africa with their monuments, and no later buildings
in Africa equal them in strength and majesty.

It is no doubt because the Almohads built in stone
that so much of what they made survives. The
Merinids took to rubble and a soft tufa, and the Cherifian
dynasties built in clay like the Spaniards in South
America. And so seventeenth century Meknez has
perished while the Almohad walls and towers of the
tenth century still stand.

The principal old buildings of Morocco are defensive
and religious—­and under the latter term
the beautiful collegiate houses (the medersas) of
Fez and Sale may fairly be included, since the educational
system of Islam is essentially and fundamentally theological.
Of old secular buildings, palaces or private houses,
virtually none are known to exist; but their plan
and decorations may easily be reconstituted from the
early chronicles, and also from the surviving palaces
built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
and even those which the wealthy nobles of modern
Morocco are building to this day.